Untestability

Death Date Testing !!!!!!!!! ?

If this kind of application gonna to be a real world application in the world,then I am damn sure these developer communities would need tester communities to test it. It's double sure that some managers who don't understand the ground reality of testing would come and demand by putting pressure to the test team asking to automate and simulate the testing to limit the time needed for testing.Poor fellows !!!!When these guys will change? A billion dollar question but with no answer till date.May be after 3000th year world will have answer to this?

Its none other than Testers and Developers

It's none other than Testers and Developers.

Good Tester and Bad Tester

Attached here two photographs:Photo 1 and Photo 2. The first one was taken by me on the roads of a so called city Madurai and the second one was not taken by me using camera but I had copied from the extremesoftwaretesting website.My thanks to extremesoftwaretesting guys.

Photo 1: Work of good tester


Photo 2: Work of bad tester

Gandhiji's quote on business fits for testing too

We as indians are well aware of MK Gandhi but only very few of us know his quote on business and customer.That famous quote is shown below.

A customer is the most important visitor on our premises, he is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider in our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so.
-Mahatma Gandhi

Let me publish my quote on testing following Gandhiji's quote (I am happy to follow atleast his quotes but felt sad that couldn't follow his thoughts and principles all the time).

A developer is the most important visitor on our testing premises,he is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him.He is not an interruption in our testing work.He is the purpose of it.He is not an outsider in our testing business.He is part of it.We are not doing him a favor by testing his code.He is doing tester a favor by giving us an opportunity to test.

-Ram

Reliability

While surfing the DELL laptops website today came through the statement (refer the image): Media cards are inserted and removed 2000 times to ensure they work for you all the time.

On looking at the above image the key term which stroked my mind was Reliability. Usually reliability is defined as the ability of a system or component or device to perform its required functions under stated conditions for a specified period of time

In one of my earlier projects I and my team were about to qualify a few USB ports present in mid-sized digital video recorder hardware. When we started testing we were not sure how to test or confirm the reliability of those two devices since there were no explicit requirements stated and the one liner requirement was USB port should be working fine for the end user. But while qualifying we have tested the USB ports by inserting USB sticks and checking whether the sticks are identified by the hardware and the reliability of this behavior was tested by us by continuously doing this test for 30 times since exhaustive testing like qualifying this behavior for more than 1000 or 10000 times and that too by manually is practically impossible and tedious. But we have not failed to mention these 30 successful attempts with the results in the test report to keep the stakeholders well aware of this.

But, as a tester, the answers to be still looked for the following questions

1. Whether the card was inserted 2000 times for testing? What about other physical sample of cards?
2. Whether the same card was inserted 2000 times continuously? What was the frequency? Every 5 minues/30 minutes/1 hour?
3. Whether the card of one particular capacity (1 GB/2 GB/etc) was inserted and tested? What about other capacity cards? Whether those cards also tested 2000 times?
4. Whether the card of one particular manufacturer (Transcend/xxxx Company) was tested? What about the cards from other manufacturers?
5. Whether all different types like SD/MicroSD/miniSD/MMC and any other available standard cards tested?

If we try to find out answers to all the above questions by doing testing of all the above points, we are sure we need to spend lot of effort and time which adds to a huge cost. But without having the results of all above tests none can claim the reader is 100% reliable.

So then how to believe the reliability of a device/gadget? This question cannot get answer easily since even no normal human being knows how many more days in general he can live further in this world and reliability is one such thing according to me.

"Best Testing Tip" at Bug-de-bug Chennai event on 29 Jan 2011

I am happy to blog here that the testing tip of mine selected as the best testing tip at the bug-de-bug software testing event organized by Society for Rich Internet Application and Rich User Interface on 29th Jan 2011 at Chennai.

Among the 34 testing tips posters of all the participants they had selected mine as the best testing tip (I am sure there was second prize too for the best testing tip contest but sorry to say that I could not remember the details about the winner and his/her testing tip.When any of the readers of this post come to know about that second prize winner please write to me with the details.Hope bug-de-bug team will post all those testing tips in the bug-de-bug website to serve the testing community).

At the closing time of the event they had annouced this news and gave me that prize which was awesome to me and that prize was a book titled "Lessons learned in SOFTWARE TESTING" authored by CEM KANER, JAMES BACH and BRET PETTICHORD.

With lots of applauds from the crowd,receiving the prize was the happiest moment to me and another surprise was waiting for me when I opened the inner side of the front cover of the book where there was a statement " THIS BOOK CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE.ITS NOW IN YOUR HANDS" with the signature of Pradeep Soundararajan, one of the well known testing evangelists from India.Pradeep Soundararajan is the Co-founder, Director and Chief Consultant of Moolya.

Hereby I would like to convey my sincere thanks to the bug-de-bug team for selecting me as a winner in the Best Testing Tip contest and a special thanks mentioning to Pradeep for his wonderful words on the front cover of the book and a very special thanks to Moolya software testing private limited who sponsored this prize.

I am self aware that this testing tip of mine is not the best testing tip of the world and its just looked to be best among the tips of other participants of this testing event.My hearty congratulations and wishes to other prize winners and participants of this best testing tip contest.

Yes I do not want to further test your patience and here you go with that testing tip.

Tomorrow Never Dies;Testing Never Ends

Tomorrow never dies and testing never ends and thats why they had coined the term as testing where ing represents the continuous tense (all the three past,present and future).you were testing yesterday, You are testing today and you will be testing tomorrow.